Old-timers on the Panama Railroad were wont to say that the construction of the line had cost a life for every single crosstie between Aspinwall (now Colón) and the Pacific. Modern historians say that claim is nonsense; it was more like a life for every eight or ten crossties. Whatever the numbers, the cost in both money ($8 million in gold, or about $175 million in today's inflated currency) and lives was incredibly high for what would end up as less than fifty miles of railroad.

But that short fifty miles would prove to be a pivotal turning point in the history of the Americas. Without it neither the first U.S. transcontinental railroad nor the Panama Canal could have been constructed in anything close to their present forms. To speed construction the Big Four of the Central Pacific shipped the lion's share of their building materiel via Panama; without this expeditious link the junction point with the Union Pacific would have been somewhere in western Nevada if indeed the Central Pacific could have been built at all. And the Panama Canal could never have been more than a dream without the railroad to move the massive amounts of earth displaced by the immense excavations.

Read about the history of Panama and the railroad at The Panama Railroad pages.

The Panama Railroad's passenger schedules disappeared from the Official Guide in the early 1950s, replaced by a thumbnail entry which gave basic railroad information and touted "Frequent Daily Passenger Service". In more recent years the railroad fell into disrepair, but in 1998 a joint venture of Kansas City Southern and Mi-Jack products was awarded a 50-year concession to rebuild and upgrade the line for modernized freight and passenger service. It continues to operate today.